Overview
- Riverhead Books has published It Will Come Back to You, Nunez’s first short-story collection, which brings together 13 pieces from different periods of her career.
- Nunez told interviewers that the stories are invented and not autobiographical, and that a burst of creativity after her novel The Vulnerables produced several of the new pieces.
- Critics emphasize a central thematic thread of memory and the ‘return of the repressed,’ noting that secrets and buried pasts repeatedly resurface to shape characters’ lives.
- Reviewers praise Nunez’s spare, warm prose and her formal habit of withholding full revelation, often ending stories just short of a clear epiphany.
- The stories are set in New York City and its environs, range across socioeconomic experience, many first appeared in respected magazines, and the collection offers readers a compact way into Nunez’s longstanding concerns with family and shame.